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He walked away under a dripping live oak toward his Caddy, his sports coat stretched to splitting on his huge shoulders.
He dropped me off at the house and I went inside and lay down on the bed in the back room. Earlier I said I had slept for fifteen hours. The truth is a little different. I could not rid myself of the sense of violation I had experienced at the hands of Tito and Caesar Dellacroce and the man who had urinated on me. I felt that soap could not cleanse my skin or my hair. When I closed my eyes and began to drift into sleep, I didn't dream of the Dellacroces but instead of a war few people are interested in today. I heard automatic weapons fire, the thropping of helicopter blades, and I saw strings of white light foundtaining inside jungle foliage from the explosion of a phosphorus round. I felt a medic from Staten Island tying my wrists so I would not tea
r at the compress on my side. I smelled the odor of blood and feces in the uniforms of both the living and the dead being piled around me on the floor of an overloaded slick piloted by a nineteen-year-old warrant officer who had taken a steel splinter in one eye.
Sleep occurred in ten-minute intervals, and each time I awoke I wanted four inches of Black Jack straight up, vodka that had been at least twelve hours in a freezer, beer that hit the back of the throat like a spray of golden needles, yellow mescal with a thick green worm in the bottom of the bottle.
An hour after Clete had dropped me off I sat on the side of the bed with a head full of cobwebs, my mouth dry and tasting like bitters. Helen had told me not to come back to work until the following Monday. But memory was the enemy, and solitude and inactivity gave me no respite from it. I called N.O.P.D. and left a message for Clotile Arceneaux. A half hour later she called me back. "What's happening baby cakes?" she said.
"Baby cakes?"
I heard her laugh. "What can I help you with?" she said.
"What have you got on Merchie Flannigan?"
"A pipeline or oil guy, grew up in the projects, did some time when he was a kid?"
"That's the one."
"I'll check but I think he's pretty inactive."
"Clete thinks maybe Merchie and his wife might have been mixed up with the Dellacroce brothers."
"What about the Dellacroces?"
"They're dead. Max Coll smoked them both."
"So much for inner-department communications. Coll killed them?"
"He's posing as a priest and carrying a couple of .45 autos in a briefcase. Tito and Caesar Dellacroce abducted me. They took me to a fish camp not far from where Coll killed their cousin." It sounded foolish when I said it.
She paused a moment. "What did they do to you at this fish camp?" she asked.
"Nothing. Coll capped them."
She paused again and I could tell she didn't believe me. "Let me give you a tip. Screw Max Coll and screw the Dellacroces. The issue is porn and crystal meth. Everything else is secondary. New Orleans was made for it. You with me on this?"
"No."
"That's what I thought."
"Sorry to bother you," I said.
"Don't give me any of your guff, Robicheaux. You doin' okay over there?"
"Why?"
""Cause you don't sound like it," she said.
So that's why she was undercover at N.O.P.D." I thought after I hung up. Some cops were probably on a meth pad and maybe the pornographers had gotten to a few of them, too. Porn had always been there, in one form or another, and sex and the economics of New Orleans tourism were longtime business companions. The Mob maintained they didn't traffic in porn, just as they claimed they didn't deal in narcotics. But they lied. They were involved in every pernicious enterprise in the United States, and decades ago had branched into shipping, the meat industry, and coal mining. The numbers racket used to be the lubricant that fueled and greased all their other machinery, but since state lotteries and legalized gambling had replaced numbers as their chief source of money, the progeny of Lucky Luciano and Benny Siegel had shifted gears to keep up with the times.
Not only had the Internet provided huge new markets for porn producers, their businesses had a built-in edge on dope trafficking. They had the First Amendment to hide behind, and most zoning boards had no problem in allowing them to open their businesses in neighborhoods where the residents, usually the poor and elderly, had no power.
The overhead was low. Junkies, demented sluts, and perverts of every stripe couldn't wait to take off their clothes in front of the camera, convinced their acting careers were just beginning.
The subject of pornography brought to mind Fat Sammy Figorelli again. He had warned me about a man he said hurt people without cause, although Sammy, in his self-serving fashion, managed not to mention the man's name. Clete was right. I had given Sammy a free pass too long. I called Clotile Arceneaux again.
"I need a favor," I said.
